FeatureRequests

• WikiGeeking for detailed discussion, information about the code etc
• BackBurnerFeatureRequests for things aren't being done for some good or bad reason, to keep ancient clutter off this page
• ImplementedFeatureRequests for things that have now been done.

Dan believes should be on a more appropriate page, only one doesn't exist yet.

[MoonShadow] runs what appears to be the same original codebase on [ToothyWiki], who Senji knows, and may be happy to talk to us about technical issues..

That reminds me about:

Other Wikis. Perhaps ToothyWiki (and maybe others?) should be added to the intermap file? Or perhaps we should invent a DNS based thingy for Wiki interlinking. Richard (agreed: Dan)

 wiki://some.dns.entry/Page

 some.dns.entry TXT "url"

Access Logs. I want to have access counts visible somehow. A page people look at is more likely to be cred for. I think five cohorts of the most accessed 20%, next, and so on, giving a number 1-5 should be enough. A page to vote appreciation would be good too, for a separate number. That should just be a page specially identified as any links off it deserving a vote. Then vandalism and rigging can be checked for with the same mechanism as other wiki-pages.

This is the other one Dan would like to have a go at this weekend, as he's a neat hack to make it simple and efficient.

Alternative Editors. It would be good to be able to invoke an alternate editor rather than trust dodgy edit boxes. Really this is a webbrowser feature, rather than a thing to be embedded in a page, w3m, for example, does this. It seems like the more powerful browsers tend to be the ones which have broken editing boxes, so if we could implement a hack with javascript (for example) this would be fine and 'cover both ends'. -- Dan, Richard, Senji

Revelation. This came up in BookReviews: it would be nice to have a revelation feature, like ROT13 or lj-cut, where you have to take some action to see the bulk of an item, so that spoilers, punchlines to jokes, etc. can be hidden. Richard, ceb.

Yup, this and polls too (or at least similar forms), I'd like. I am going to do the plugin thing at the weekend (must do real work!), when that's done I'll add this to the plugin. Dan

Glad you said that, I was about to rush off and implement it... Richard

If I don't do it this weekend then I'll automatically expire my (advisory) lock on this. Dan

Encodings. The current setup isn't providing a header describing the character encoding in use, but apparently the Wiki software is happy to accept an arbitrary 8-bit character and send it back as-is. MHF

''I'm just wondering if this isn't some magic part of the Wiki Zen I don't get yet. My instinct is to UTF-8 the world, though, and just support one legacy incoming code as well, ISO-8859-1, as the only concesion. What do you think? Dan

[ToothyWikiInternals/NonEnglishLanguages] seems to suggest that this isn't as easy as it may seem if you want to keep old and broken browsers happy. (But not having experienced the problems it alludes to I know no more) -- Senji

Input encoding is tricky. Do any browsers actually let you specify the encoding you're using? HTML has an accept-charset attribute for forms, but I don't know if any browsers take any notice of it. I suspect using 8859-1 everywhere, using numeric character references on output and having some wiki notation for numeric character input, would be most portable. MHF

If you want to use non-ASCII characters in a form submission and remain within spec you have to use POST with a multipart/form-data encoding; you get to specify an acceptable charset (which can be UTF-8). The wiki could turn any non-ASCII characters into (some equivalent of) NCRs for further editing if we don't want to rely on browsers having good unicode support.

NCR(-like) notation for non-ASCII character input is OK for occasional use but inconvenient for cut and paste (and would obviously be hopeless if we were typing in lots of Kanji and actually had a convenient way to enter it).

diff output. Current diff output isn't very useful; you get to see one copy of a huge paragraph and then another subtly different copy. Something that made the actual (possibly quite small) changes clearer would be more useful. I realize that this may not be a trivial request. Richard

EmacsWiki [1] shows word diffs, and I believe it's also a modified UseMod. Sensei's Library [2] has it too, but that's some kind of PHP thing. MHF

I agree, even a -u diff (like cvsweb) would be better than what we have right now, but a per-word one would be even better still. I'll look into 3diff. Dan

The discussion, now on BackBurnerFeatureRequests, about automatic cvs diffs comes down to the issue of a better diff (one at all on the conflict page) once/if you decide automatic conflict resolution is a bad thing (as Dan is almost certain of, now). Having a word-based diff output would go a long way to answering peoples concerns about the resolution issue without complexity.

Usernames. Why does my username have to have a capital letter? *grumble* -- ceb

I haven't checked this very deeply at all yet, but there seems to be a flag that would alter this. That would suggest to me that there are good reasons and bad reasons why you might want to change that. I don't know what they might be, yet, so I'll have a bit of a think, but it seems sensible to enable them to me on first inspection. -- Dan

Access Control. Would it be a good idea to have the ability for an author to make a post (a) append only except for the author or (b) only editable by the author? Possibly evolving into more generalised read/write access control? Or would this be against the underlying philosophy or something? Cassandra

''I think that having mechanical read/write access control would be against the philosophy really. I think the idea is that you don't really own things except to the extent that you tend them. I think it's perfectly in order, though, to put a rude sign at the top of a few precious pages asking people respect your policy (though I don't htink there are many things where you'd need to do that) and then (or otherwise) gonig through the diffs for the page and resotring them if people don't do that. I guess something like links off to webpages would be more appropriate for sometheing like that.

I dunno though, I don't want to seem like I'm laying down the law, because I'm making it up as I go along. Any other opinions? -- Dan

My own thought is that it would be nice in that it allows for the creation of different kinds of resource. Maybe if there were some logical separation between the anarchist free state and the slightly less wilder parts of the Wiki? Perhaps a seperate namespace or something? I'm not sure - really just throwing out ideas. Cassandra

Email notification of changes might be a good feature.

Being able to add an "email me changes in this page" tag would be good; I tend to agree with Dan that access controls (beyond a textual "please don't hack around with this" request) would be somewhat against the Wiki spirit. Emperor

You could just create a web page outside the Wiki and link to it (and back into the Wiki from it). Perhaps that makes this into another possible-but-discouraged thing (see the discussion about edit boxes in BackBurnerFeatureRequests). Richard

Perhaps there is a concept of HalfWikis here...

Spell checking. As a suggested interface: any words not in the Wiki's word list (say, /usr/share/dict/words) be highlighted in a different background color in the preview (but not in the normaly display of a page; that would make typos be unnecessarily distracting). Optionally, make this a preference, or a switch you can set when you edit the page.

The spellchecker should also incorporate the contents of one Wiki page into its dictionary, so that new words can be added in the Wiki way.

Style Sheets. Things like the spell checking colorization suggested above could be implemented via a style sheet, so a way of making it configurable would be for the user to impose their own stylesheet instead (and all web browsers ought to let you do this l-)

The "Revert" link on the "View other revisions" page seems to always drop me straight into an Edit Conflict screen, is this intentional? -- Senji

No, it's a bug.

Is there a way to represent tables? When transwikiing a page (from a TWiki) just now I ended up converting everything to ugly lists :-( Alternatively, is there a way to HTML-escape? -- Crazyscot